Muhammad Salah, the only U.S. citizen on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Terrorist list, has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for lying about his ties to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

Salah, 54, was convicted by a federal district court in Chicago of obstruction of justice for lying about his Hamas connections in the course of a civil lawsuit brought by the family of an American teenager killed in a West Bank terrorist attack.  The family had sued Salah and a number of Islamic charities, including the Holy Land Foundation, claiming that they had funneled money to Hamas.

During the July 11, 2007, hearing, Salah was also fined $25,000 and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. 

In February, when Salah and a co-defendant, Abdelhaleem Ashqar of Virginia, were convicted of the obstruction charges, they were acquitted of racketeering conspiracy in support of Hamas’s terrorist campaigns in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Ashqar is scheduled to be sentenced in September.  Abu Mousa Marzook, the Deputy Political Bureau Chief of Hamas, was also charged in the case.  He is a fugitive believed to be living in Syria.

Salah, born in a Palestinian refugee camp, spent nearly five years in an Israeli prison in the mid-1990s for providing money and other aid to Hamas for its use in attacks on Israel.